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For Perspective

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For Perspective magazine

Around the final Daniel Craig installment, there’s been inevitable talk of who should be the next James Bond. Well, I’ll tell you who it shouldn’t be, and that’s Matthew Goode.

Three years ago, Anthony Horowitz was hired to write Forever and a Day, the umpteenth licensed 007® novel since the death of – and ‘with original material by’ – the master himself. Horowitz’s second outing in fact, FaaD was almost universally well received, a neatly-threaded Double-O origin story for Bond (more assured even than Fleming’s own Casino Royale, perhaps), set ‘just five years after VE Day’, amid the depressed 1950s at home, the distant Korean War abroad, and the CIA starting to interfere in both Europe and SE Asia, its focus on the drugs trade.

Tonally, Horowitz pulls off an atomically-precise emulation of Fleming’s own prose pulse-quickening whenever he talks of wine, women, cars and, here, the Riviera. Content-wise, he is exceedingly familiar with the source material, and has some clever fun with both Bond’s weary tropes and Fleming’s biotrivia.

In short, the book’s a (retro) classic, and I’d strongly recommend it.

Alas, I cannot say the same for Matthew Goode’s recording.

Bond may have been an unblinking British patriot; but he had his creator’s knowledge of, and lust for, all things foreign and exotic – and would have known, for sure, how to pronounce them.

I suppose it’s possible that M might render ‘Scipio’ (bad guy) as ‘Sippio’, and ‘Carbone’ as ‘Car-bone’ (like Churchill mispronouncing ‘Narzis’?); but ‘Unione Siciliana’ is ‘Sichiliana’, surely? The very first restaurant Bond dines in (a real, Swedish one) should not be ‘Catellin’, but ‘Cattelin’. And Soviet cruiser captain Stolypin’s wife would have been ‘Irr-ma’, not ‘Urma’ as though born in Huddersfield.

It’s ‘Taube‘ not ‘Taub’ (German for ‘dove’, a plane, and – perfectly – a deaf person). And ‘Ravens-brook’ (sic) was a notorious concentration camp, not, say, a ringroad garden centre. Kompani Linge, a Norwegian SOE outfit, was named for its commander Martin Linge'(r)’, not, as Goode makes it sound, a prefab waitingroom on a charter airfield. All of this stuff is Google-able, obviously.

Closer to home, Bond’s Scottish housekeeper calls someone a ‘bawheid’ (not a ‘boar-hide’); and the school in Edinburgh is ‘Fett(i)s’, not ‘Fet’. Never has the battle/location in North Africa been called ‘Tobb-ruck’ – least of all by military types just after WW2!

Worst of all, though – the crime de la crime, you might say – is that M. Goode, apparently, cannot speak French.

I don’t mean Radio 3 Style Guide French: no-one expects ‘Paggghree’ or ‘fronnk(s)’. Just your basic Tricolore “pardonnez moi, madame…”.

It’s ‘Rue Fon-say‘ not ‘Rue Foncet[te]’. ‘Fives-Lille’ is not pronounced like the toffs’ handball sport.

‘Citroën’ is not the same as the French word for ‘lemon’. And there’s no Marseillaise pastis drink called ‘Rye-‘ anything.

There are no Ls in ‘Aiguilles Rouges’ (Bond’s parents died there, FFS: he would remember that). Goode’s stab at ‘Rochefoucauld’ sounds like he’s actually halfway through being stabbed. And don’t even ask about ‘Marré-quelle Fock’.

I don’t, admittedly, recall a case of canon Bond being undone by mispronunciation. But a) in this book he’s explicitly credited with ‘fluent French’, and b) brand names and other proper nouns were, famously, Fleming’s stock in trade. Duff notes like this are the equivalent of Bond stirring his drink with a McDonald’s straw.

Lastly – and I do feel unkind noting this – Goode has a slight (if well-masked) speech impediment. That thing that inverts Rs and Ws. So we get ‘hewoin’, ‘Hotel Negwesco’, ‘enemy tewitowy’, ‘twuly desiwable’, ‘neutwality’, ‘Bewetta’, ‘quite an opewator’, ‘Miwabelle‘, ‘Gweat Bwitain’, ‘secuwity’, and… ‘the Secwet Service’.

This could be brilliant for skewering the louche, adulterous, sadistic Ian Fleming. But as James Bond, the uber-man and fantasy projection (a concept openly addressed in FaaD)…? Well, once you’ve heard it, it’s a little hard to take him sewiously.

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For Perspective magazine

Here are the (brutally-abbreviated) highlights of those proceedings.

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For The Sunday Times (SL)

In 1935 the troops of Benito Mussolini’s sinister-clownish Roman Empire II invaded Ethiopia, in large part out of spite for Italy’s embarrassing defeat there 40 years before.

Initially largely uncontested – thanks both to emperor Haile Selassie’s desperate faith in international brotherhood and to a hearty dose of Quislingism from his leading nobles – when ‘war’ eventually did break out it was so one-sided that Ethiopian women were gathering spent bullet-casings for re-use while Italian planes (the older Ethiopians believing these were dragons) dropped poison gas on them. Selassie, meanwhile, fled to England.

The conflict inevitably degenerated into guerilla tactics on the one side and terrible reprisals on the other. Step forward Ettore Navarra, ‘an earnest young Venetian who has come into [the] army with a camera,’ and whose colonel now instructs him to document the founding of this new Etiopia italiana. (Stand by for ‘shooting’ tropes.)

Step forward also Hirut, a highland servant girl, and other women from all levels of Ethiopian society, who reject their traditional wartime roles as nurses and corpse-buriers, and together manufacture the illusion – ‘shadow king’ – that the Emperor has not abandoned his people and his country after all.

As the story of an unremembered war, bedecked with referential trimmings of Old Testament, Homeric myth, and Verdian opera, and book-ended by Victorian and Cold War military contexts, I had expected to enjoy The Shadow King a lot more.

Alas, although – NB – the novel hardly frames itself as Abyssinian Andy McNab, this story of ‘what it means to be a woman at war’ is overwhelmingly more about the former than the latter.

The book is avowedly seen by its author as an act of restitution to ‘those women and girls of Ethiopia… who stood up’ (her great-grandmother included) – but the ramifications of this seem to have spiralled rather. The case is more or less made that women are by nature so inured to horror that war is something they can just take in their stride, and there is a lot of nose-tapping about what they ‘know’ of life (imagine this with gender roles reversed); the insanely murderous Italians are only fractionally more demonised than Hirut’s countrymen (sic); and the prose inclines heavily to the poetical, quite often with a physical aspect to it – ‘the battlefield is her own body’, etc. – that will strain the patience of some (one might guess male) readers.

Ultimately, though, if the complaint is (and it is) that the official histories of this war leave out the women, then – given the freedoms inherent to a ‘work of fiction’ – The Shadow King strangely makes no substantive claim that there were armies (or even companies) of latter-day Amazons roaming the Ethiopian mountains, slaying enemies. As far as war per se is concerned, the roles of these few women remain, frankly, auxiliary.

From the strictly historical view, what’s more, the novel also implies – by near-total omission – that Ethiopian irregulars (of both sexes) won back their country though their unrelenting, native efforts. This chimes well with the proud, continuing claim of Ethiopia to be ‘the only African nation never conquered’; but might be news to the thousands of British and Imperial forces who entered Italian-held Ethiopia in 1940-41, and thus restored the real Haile Selassie to his kingdom.

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For The Spectator

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For The Spectator

— The Nelson Evening Mail, September 8 1908
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Benedict Cumberbatch reads Oryx magazine.

A piece of pasta (dry) weighs essentially one gram.

A man can only care about so many things.

Labels are for clothes.

In Bosnian there are no words for fiction and non-fiction.

The eating of grapes has killed several Englishmen by throwing them into fluxes and fevers.

Allah does not like hearing the word ‘Allah’.

The shooting schedules in pornography are quite brisk.

Darryl Gerrity loves people, perhaps too much.

Washing machines live longer with cows on.

It’s all kicking off in Jamestown. 

Russian composer Dmitri Kabalevsky died on this day in 1987.

Two childhood friends in Honolulu have recently found out that they are brothers.
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‘Nobody wants to do a year in Iraq’, mutters one of the narrators in Phil Klay’s Redeployment, ‘and come back with nothing but stories about the soft-serve ice-cream machine at the embassy cafeteria.’

No kidding. And Klay (rhymes with ‘guy’) will not have been the first soldier, American or otherwise, to return from operations and find that gung-ho anecdotes were frankly expected of him. But a run-down of the opening lines in this debut story-collection – ‘We shot dogs’; ‘In any other vehicle we’d have died’; ‘For a long time I was angry’ – would make for an more-than-acceptable PowerPoint on the diversity of American experience during their nine-year misadventure in Iraq.

Hooked very loosely on Klay’s own 13 months in Anbar Province, as a Marine Public Affairs officer, during the ‘Surge’ of 2007-8, Redeployment progressively gives voice to grunts and morticians, chaplains and Foreign Service officials, as they variously assault bomb-factories, get written up for decorations, stumble upon scenes of torture, wrangle with politicians, and (ever present throughout the project) attempt to deal with the peculiar perturbations of homecoming – which is what, in this context, ‘redeployment’ actually means.

And they tell stories. What Klay’s pieces turn out to be, in the main, are stories about stories. Stories sons hear from their veteran fathers. Hero stories as part of their not so heroic training programme: ‘In boot camp, the DIs teach you Medal of Honor stories.’ Stories made up just to fill in some paperwork. In ‘War Stories’, the protagonists try their best not to tell any stories at all.

The strategy is well-managed, the tactics subtle. Klay is naturally fluent in the distinct registers of military conversation – the salty, the salutary, the inarticulate humanity – but his frames of reference also incorporate the Jesuits, Egyptian poetry and The Wire. He instinctively plays off the rough soldierly humour against the dark realities it has always been intended to deal with, but he approaches the heavier (read ‘predictable’) issues at a cautious angle. An officer in Haditha (‘In Vietnam They Had Whores’) flaps about his troops’ collegial handing round of a ‘pocket-pussy’; a young soldier reflects that if the platoon can’t find the whorehouse they don’t know the city well enough to be there.

‘OIF’ (Operation Iraqi Freedom) is a three-page exercise in the wilful – and often smug – opacity of the military sub-language, and especially its godawful acronyms. You need a dislocated kind of intellect to wind up assessing your personal value in terms of ‘WIA’ vs ‘KIA’ – and a very unusual sensitivity to that environment to compose a story which, for the outsider, is at once completely alienating and yet makes (almost) total sense.

It’s no discredit to his own soldier-turned-author success story that Klay was already a graduate of literature and creative writing before he joined the Marine Corps, or that his Public Affairs role would have consisted substantially of listening to – and indeed shaping – ‘narratives’ on the front lines. He maintains, for the record, that he left for Iraq with no particular writing opportunity in mind. On the evidence of Redeployment, though, it can only have been a matter of time.

Phil Klay has since announced that his follow-up, a novel, is not going to be about war. A pity for military writing. But it’ll be interesting to see what he comes up with instead.

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For Literary Review